


if i am hopeful

by all_these_ghosts



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Angst, F/M, Fluff, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-09
Updated: 2016-12-16
Packaged: 2018-05-19 06:08:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 6,080
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5956519
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/all_these_ghosts/pseuds/all_these_ghosts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are days when she suspects that the journey is killing them both, and on days like today, she thinks it’s going to kill him first.</p><p>(one Scully ficlet per season/movie)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. one // ice

**Author's Note:**

> this will just be one teeny Scully-POV drabble per season, as I rewatch them for the first time in like twenty years. <3 oh show, I forgot how I love you. title is from that decemberists song that I've been listening to on repeat in the car every day.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s just that she wants to prove him wrong.

_i am waiting, should i be waiting_  
_i am wanting, should i be wanting_  
_if i am hopeful, should i be hopeful_

 // 

It’s just that she wants to prove him wrong. She thinks he’s crazy at least two-thirds of the time, and she usually dismisses people who are so irrational and so _loud_ about their irrationality - but she also can’t remember anyone before him being a challenge.

That’s what it is. She likes the challenge. She’s always loved being _right_ , it’s what got her this far, and with him there are just so many opportunities. Every conspiracy theory, every supervillain monologue, and she just raises an eyebrow that says: _Science_. Sometimes he’ll fall over himself trying to shoehorn his latest hypothesis into some kind of scientific framework, and she doesn’t hate that either. He’s at least as clever as she is - they don’t hand out those Oxford degrees for nothing - and she loves making him work for it. 

It’s just the challenge she likes.

It’s not his hands. She’s started noticing them, lately; long fingers like a pianist’s, and his nails trimmed so carefully they almost look manicured. They look better than hers, most days. Those perfect hands and those ridiculous, rumpled suits. She’s wondered if he ever combs his hair.

And sometimes he looks at her like - she doesn’t even _know_ what - but like she knows all the answers. Or maybe like she _is_ all the answers, which is impossible, since most of the time she’s sure he doesn’t even know the questions.

Most of the time.

But sometimes she wishes he would ask.


	2. two // one breath

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nothing is more complicated than love

It’s a relief to be out of the hospital.

Not that she was awake for most of it - it’s only been a week since she woke up - but she is a woman of action, and a week is a long time to spend stranded in a hospital room. She’s already lost _so much time_.

Her mother helps her up the stairs to her apartment, and Scully is distressed to find that it looks - different, somehow. Foreign. She’s been in this unit for three years now, with a couch that’s followed her around since undergrad, but nothing looks familiar. Nothing looks right.

“Sit down,” her mother urges. “I’ll make you a cup of tea.”

Scully settles into the old couch, curling her legs up beneath her. Listens to the sounds from the kitchen - the kettle boiling, her mother’s soft footsteps. The soundtrack from someone else’s life.

From _her_ life, three months ago.

The couch sinks in as her mother sits down next to her, handing over the tea. Scully wraps her hands around the mug, inhaling the steam and the scent. Waiting for the familiar to return. Waiting for home.

And her mother says, out of nowhere, “Your partner - Fox - he was at the hospital with you. Nearly every day.”

“Was he?” she says, watching the way her breath ripples across the tea. She’s not surprised, not at all, but something in her still brightens to hear it. Triggers a memory, fragile; his hands on hers. A promise.

“Dana,” her mother says, hesitant, which is unusual. She’s a straight shooter, like everyone else in the family. “Is he just - is he just your partner?”

She can’t help grinning at that, though she hides it behind the mug. “Mulder’s not _just_ anything.”

Her mother narrows her eyes. Resolute, she gently touches her daughter’s chin, forcing eye contact. “Do you love him?” she asks.

There it is.

Scully has asked herself that question plenty of times over the last two years, and she’s never come to a satisfactory answer. Even if she knew, even if she was sure, it wouldn’t change anything. They’re partners - _just_ partners? - and she won’t give that up. Not even for something - _more_. Whatever that would look like. 

Shifting her gaze downward, she just says, “It’s complicated.”

Her mother sighs. “Oh, Dana,” she says, and there’s a world of longing and _missing_ in her voice. “Nothing is more complicated than love.”

Hours later, long after she’s fallen asleep, the phone rings. She picks it up halfway through the first ring. “Hello?” she says, even though she knows who it is. Who it always is.

“Hey,” he says. “You’re home. I just wanted to hear your voice. Sorry. Were you sleeping?”

A glance at the clock shows that it’s one in the morning, and she wonders (not for the first time) if he _ever_ sleeps, but all she says is: “It’s fine. What’s going on?”

And he starts telling her about some new crazy thing, some bodies found in a condemned office building marked with signs of ritual sacrifice. He wants to fly out to Omaha as soon as he can, but Skinner’s been giving him a hard time about it. A smile teases at the corners of her mouth. So much for pillow talk. So much for _I just wanted to hear your voice_.

She knows he’ll do a full show-and-tell as soon as she’s back at work, so she lets herself tune out the words. Listens to the cadence of his voice. They’ve had a hundred conversations like this, in the middle of the night, and she’s always considered them a peculiarity of his. Something she just has to accept. An inconvenience; the cost of being Spooky Mulder’s confidante. 

Tonight it’s different. She lets him talk through all of his theories. She doesn’t tell him they’ll figure it out in the morning. She doesn’t try to get back to sleep.

She’s finally home, and he’s the only thing that feels familiar.


	3. three // pusher

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There are days when she suspects that the journey is killing them both, and on days like today, she thinks it’s going to kill him first.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> On to season three :) I'm enjoying this re-watch way too much, haha.
> 
> Comments are pored over, loved, and appreciated :D

She’s more shaken than she should be. Everything’s fine. They’ve seen worse.

After they left the hospital she took him home. They’d picked up Thai food on the way to his apartment and eaten it in silence on his couch. She kept looking at him, just to make sure he was still there. Now on the drive home, his face flashes behind her eyelids every time she blinks.

Scully is sure he would’ve stopped himself from shooting her. He’d fought it and fought it and even if the worst part of her whispers, _good thing we didn’t have to find out_ , she knows deep down that he wouldn’t have done it.

But she can’t forget how easily he turned that gun on himself. He didn’t even hesitate before pulling the trigger. _One in five_.

Her heart in that moment, seeing him like that. The angle just right: there would be no surviving that wound. It would be quick. It would even be painless, at least for him.

And how instinctual it looked in the moment. Like he’d practiced.

As soon as she gets home she throws up in the bathroom sink.

Sometimes she touches him just to keep him tethered to the earth. Like if she holds his hand or wraps her arm around his waist, Mulder won’t just float off into space.

Or worse.

She’s known him for three and a half years, and it’s already cost her so much. Her reputation. Her weekends. Three entire months.

Her sister. Her health, she thinks, her brain stubbornly lighting on the memory of that woman in the hospital, cancer spreading through her bones.

There are days when she suspects that the journey is killing them both, and on days like today, she thinks it’s going to kill him first.

 _Everything’s fine_ , she tells herself. _We’ve seen worse_.

And she knows worse is coming.


	4. four // never again

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is the impasse, she thinks. This is the line. These are the things we are not allowed to say to one another.

His fingers on her back, tracing the scabs on her latest wound. A wound she’d chosen, for once. It was so fucking good to be wanted. A reminder that she’s alive, at least for now, and that her body hasn’t entirely betrayed her. Her body can still feel pleasure, can still _want_. At least until the timer runs out.

Now, in the harsh fluorescence of their basement office - _Mulder’s_ basement office, she reminds herself, it's _his_ name on the door, _his_ desk in the corner - she wants to regret it.

And sure, it would have been better if it had been someone else. But no one else was offering.

Mulder looks at her, proprietary, and whatever he starts to say - _yes but it's my_ \- she doesn't want to hear it. This is the impasse, she thinks. This is the line. These are the things we are not allowed to say to one another.

One day soon she'll have to tell him. She will go to the hospital, a trip she's been putting off, where she will get a CT scan that will confirm that she is dying. Just like all of those other women.

Scully had judged them, those women in Betsy Hagopian's living room. They weren't like her. They were housewives and secretaries, innocents who didn’t know about conspiracies and cabals, about men smoking in wood-paneled rooms and plotting destruction. Just because it happened to them didn't mean it would happen to her. She was a doctor, an FBI agent. A fighter.

She’s been almost-killed so many times in so many statistically improbable ways. She should have known it would be cancer, in the end. In quiet moments, she’s started counting her breaths, knowing now with certainty that the number is finite.

She isn’t special. She isn’t invincible. She is just like everyone else.

And she is running out of time.

Mulder is looking at his desk and Scully is looking at the wall and she cannot imagine the words that would bridge this gap. There are so many things she wants to say - wants _him_ to say - and all of them will make this worse.

She wonders if he could fuck the disease out of her. She wonders what he’d do if she asked him to try.

She wonders what he’ll do when she tells him she is going to die.

“I should go,” she says, an impossible length of time later. Dallas can wait. Or he can take care of it himself. She stops herself from following that train of thought toward its logical conclusion: _he’ll have to do it all himself, soon enough_.

“Scully.” His lower lip caught in his teeth, like he’s trying to figure out how to ask her what happened. For one of the FBI’s top profilers, there is so little he understands about human beings. About her. She is not going to talk about this. There is nothing to talk about. Those are equivalent statements, at least for today.

She stands up and his eyes follow her to the door. He is always looking at her and some days it’s a welcome warmth, but today all she feels is the weight of his disappointment. All she wants to say in response is _you don’t have any right_ , but all she actually says is, “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

The door clicks shut behind her and she pauses in the hallway. Scully can hear him shuffling papers, hears the chair creak when he stands, hears his footsteps approaching the door. The knob jiggles like his hand is on the other side and she discovers that she is holding her breath.

The door doesn’t open, but she swears she can hear him breathing on the other side. No footsteps. No more movement towards her, or away. 

She exhales, counting.


	5. five // emily

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ugh I am noooot happy with this which is why it's not been posted, but I have the next two done SO here we are. It's weird! I love season five, but this was a struggle. (maybe because my original intention turned into that too-long Detour fic, ha.)

Everything in its place. Her books in alphabetical order on the shelves, subdivided by topic. All of her mugs and plates stack neatly in the cupboards and all of her silverware matches. She never leaves files from work on her desk any longer than necessary: they come home, she writes her report, and the files return to the office. She cannot picture children in this home. The chaos of small bodies, toys strewn across the floor. Tantrums that would wake the neighbors.

Mulder stops by her apartment and brings disorder with him, as always. He is a tornado, upending everything she has so carefully arranged.

“Hey,” he says, shouldering his way through her door without an invitation.

Unfortunately she doesn’t know how to be angry with him when he's like this: hands in his pockets, eyes downcast, worrying his lower lip. 

She looks at him expectantly. The door hangs open within arms’ reach of both of them, but neither of them reaches out to close it.

“I just wanted to see how you’re doing.”

“I’m fine, Mulder.” _Second verse, same as the first_.

That lip. “You can talk to me,” he says, gruff, uncertain, “if you want to.”

There’s no good way to say _I don’t_ , so she doesn’t. “I just need some time,” she says instead, and that’s not a lie.

“Okay.” He’s shifting on his feet and she can tell he wants to keep asking, but to his immense credit he leaves off. “I, uh, brought you something." He holds out a padded manila envelope, the end torn open. It's addressed to _FBI AGENTS MULDER AND SCULLY_ in a sloppy scrawl, and she raises an eyebrow in Mulder's direction.

He shrugs. "There were two copies," he says. "The one in there is for you. Take a look at it when you get a chance."

"Okay," she says, drawing out the "o."

After he leaves she has no reason to hide her curiosity. She opens the envelope and pulls out a comic book: _The Great Mutato_.

"Mulder," she complains aloud, even though he’s halfway to Alexandria by now. And then her eyes scan down to the bottom: _...meets the FBI!_ it reads in bold comic book letters.

She pages through the little book. The black-and-white line drawings of her and Mulder capture something true; in the ink she sees something of Mulder's wildness and wonder, something of her own sympathy and self-control.

The story is all familiar until she reaches the end, and she presses her hand to her lips. The Great Mutato, at a Cher concert with all of the townspeople attending. They cheer him on as he dances with his idol.

And the last four panels: Mulder reaches a hand out to her, looking away, all of his wildness corralled for the moment. A close up of her face, surprised and not at all displeased, as she reaches back. A wide shot, spanning the width of the page: the Mutato and Cher, everyone in the crowd smiling, and her and Mulder. Dancing.

In the last frame they turn towards - the camera? the artist? the stage? Their faces almost touching, eyes looking past the frame in the same direction. Looking towards something the reader can’t see.

Yes, she thinks. This is something true. 

All the things they’ve seen. Most days it feels like a burden, but she can remember wonder, too, and awe. She’s always had to turn it off - can't let him see, have to maintain that veneer of skepticism and rationality - but wonder has always been there, under the surface. She’s followed him a long way.

And when it counts, he’s followed her too.

Mulder at that hearing, defending her right to be a mother, even though he thought it was a bad idea. He offered to stay with her as Emily passed, and he left when she asked him to. He mourned that little girl with her. Her mother didn’t understand, and maybe he didn’t either, but at least he pretended.

That little girl. Her daughter, in a certain light. Her daughter: there was no one else to claim her at her funeral. Her mother brought sorrow and misunderstanding, Bill and Tara brought skepticism and their own blessed baby, and Mulder - Mulder brought flowers.

There are days when he is the brightest thing in the universe.

She is building a shrine to her losses. She is putting them away. Everything in its place: the photograph of Emily, tucked into a desk drawer. She wraps her necklace around her index finger and places it, coiled, on top of the picture. Everything in its place.

Her copy of _The Great Mutato_ sits on top of the desk, open to the last page. This, too, will find a home on a shelf. In a magazine file, probably, stashed away with old medical journals and poetry chapbooks sent to her by college friends.

Eventually, anyway.

For now, she'll leave it out.


	6. five point five // fight the future

They are curled up in the snow at the edge of a vast nothingness, and she realizes very suddenly that this is how she dies.

After everything, all of the strife and regret, she will die here. In this great whiteness. They say that freezing to death is an easy way to go, but she is a doctor and a realist and nothing, nothing has ever been easy for them.

He has already stopped shivering. She didn’t think it would happen so fast, and she isn’t ready. There are things she wanted to say.

She pulls him closer, gritting her teeth and bowing her head against the wind. He followed her here, and they are going to die.

His breath turns to crystals in the air, and she presses her lips to his cold, cold skin.

It’s the end of the world, but at least she’s with him.


	7. six // rain king

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Even under oath she couldn’t tell you what color his eyes are.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I mean...they have to have talked about it, right? RIGHT??

It’s one in the morning and she knows he’s awake: his breathing is still shallow, uneven. He’s curled up on his side facing away from her, wearing a t-shirt - a concession to her presence. He is broad and lean and quiet, and she doesn’t know what makes her say it other than the fact that she knows he’s awake.

“I don’t mind sharing a room,” she says, her voice husky with sleep. “This way I can protect you.” A grin creeps up on her, and she can't keep it out of her voice. “From flying cows.” _And amorous farm girls_ , she thinks.

From the other side of the bed he laughs, low in his chest. Without speaking they both move toward the center of the mattress until he is flat on his back and she is tucked up against him, her head on his chest, her right arm sprawled across his torso.

She exhales.

They lie there for a while, listening to the night sounds. No cows.

His voice is a low rumble, thunder in his chest, and she feels it more than hears it when he says, “What are we doing?”

Pressed up against him, her hand fisting in the soft cotton of his t-shirt, she considers it. _Not even a kiss?_ Sheila had asked, eyes wide, disbelieving. But sometimes Scully thinks that this line, this physical separation, is the only thing that keeps him from subsuming her completely.

Not that she can tell him that.

So she sighs. “If the Bureau found out, they’d separate us. And I don’t - I don’t want to risk destroying what we have.”

“Do you think it would?”

“Not necessarily. But it’s a risk.”

More silence. “What else, Scully?” he asks, finally.

When she looks up at him his eyes are dark, glinting; he is a creature, something _other_ , even with his arms so familiar around her. She can see his uncertainty in the shape of his mouth, the set of his jaw. The uncertainty - and the desire, and the fear.

Roughly, he says, “Do you want me?”

And there it is: the precipice.

She turns her face into his t-shirt, enjoying the softness, still wishing it was skin. It isn’t something she has the words for, not yet, but she knows how he’ll taste.

He pulls away just enough to prop himself up on one elbow and look down at her, but she doesn’t meet his gaze. She’s still on her side, blue eyes staring past him into the middle distance.

“I’m afraid,” she says quietly.

“Of what?” he asks, even more quietly.

She can feel his eyes boring into the side of her skull, so she looks up at him, draws her hand up to trace the lines on his forehead. All of the weight there. Even under oath she couldn’t tell you what color his eyes are.

She whispers, “You’re already everything else to me.” Her voice doesn’t break.

And he nods, biting his lip. After a beat his arms come around her again, holding her closer now, more sure. She wonders, if Fox Mulder controlled the weather, what it would look like.

Outside, it starts to rain.


	8. seven // sein und zeit

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She’s a life preserver and this has always been a sinking ship.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> slow going here at the end of the series (and the end of the school year, which means more time spent grading and less time spent binge-watching TV)
> 
> but thanks for waiting :)
> 
> (I said when we watched this episode that asking Scully to perform the autopsy on his mother is possibly the worst thing Mulder ever asks her to do, and I stand by that. It's just brutal.)

It’s an impossible thing, what he’s asked of her, but Mulder is built on impossible things.

She’s perfected the art of clinical detachment, but she still curses him for asking, still curses herself for not being able to say no. She’s perfected the art of clinical detachment, but it’s never been tested quite so thoroughly.

His mother on the table, a knife in Scully’s hand. The room smells chemical, like bleach and formaldehyde. She has done this a thousand times before. In Teena Mulder’s face she sees Mulder; pain and fear carved matching lines in both their faces. Her silent heart and loose joints are his inheritance. Scully doesn’t want to be there when it happens.

Doesn’t he understand that cutting his mother open is not so different from cutting him open - not different enough at all. Her gloves are too thin, dry and powdery on her hands. _This is the body that made you_ , she thinks, making the Y-incision. _This is where you came from_.

When she goes to him later she is helpless; there is nothing she can say that will offer him any comfort. He is listening to his mother’s answering machine message, and that will not give him any comfort either. She knows.

Scully knows. She saw her father’s ghost and wished for a miracle that never came.

And there is nothing else to do, no running from this. Mulder is a middle-aged orphan and it is the most natural thing in the world. The world they inhabit is miraculous, and this - this is so terribly mundane.

“She didn’t tell me,” he mumbles, his face buried in her shoulder. “Scully. She didn’t tell me. I never called her back, I never—“ And she never wants to hear him like this again, this keening, broken sound. Grief is pulling him under and he clutches at her, his hands pulling her closer, bunching up the fabric of her shirt. She’s a life preserver and this - this has always been a sinking ship.

After some time - an hour, maybe two - his breathing settles. They’re both on the floor and he’s wrapped around her: his head in her lap, his long limbs curled up and tangled with hers. Her feet have fallen asleep and she can feel the tingling moving up her calves, but she just stays, stroking his hair, keeping him afloat.


	9. eight // alone

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been out of town and internetless for a long time, but I got some things done while I was away; I'll put things up over the next week or two :)

“Dana,” her mother says, her voice thin over the phone lines, “I haven’t asked you because I thought you wouldn’t want - well, I just want you to know that you can talk to me.”

“I know, Mom.” She feels tired saying it. She is tired of having variations of this conversation every week, she is tired of not telling, she is just so fucking tired.

A key turns in her lock and she says, “I’ve gotta go, Mom, someone’s at the door,” and her mother says her name again, almost pleading, but it’s been a very long time since _Dana_ felt like her at all.

Mulder comes through the door with a bag of Chinese food. Just like old times, but without any X-files to discuss. Oh, and she’s pregnant, and oh, he was dead a month ago. They are still tentative around each other. Adjusting. He was gone a long time.

“Your mom?” he asks, putting the food down on the table.

Scully gets off the couch, bracing herself. She refuses to complain about the logistics of being pregnant, after everything she’s been through to get here, but - Jesus. Evolution failed human women.

“As usual.”

“You could just tell her.” Mulder doesn’t look at her when he says this.

Instead of responding she starts pulling dishes and silverware out of the cabinets, even though they usually eat Chinese food out of the cartons with disposable chopsticks, sloppily. Over the years she’s watched Mulder slurp a lot of noodles.

He puts his hand on her forearm. “Scully,” he says. And she thinks about hearing him say that name, the name her father gave her; she thinks about all the ways that she has been transformed. She wonders what her father would see if he looked at her now.

“It’s complicated.”

“Yeah,” he says, “so what?”

There is no way to explain this without starting a fight: the fear that’s been growing. Lately when she looks at him all she can see is his shadow turning the corner. He’s doing all the right things: bringing her dinner, sitting through Lamaze classes, going with her to buy onesies and a bassinet.

He’s doing all the right things, but she can’t look at him without wondering when he is going to disappear again.

 _So what do I tell my mother, Mulder_ , she wants to ask. Unspoken, the words feel sharp in her mouth. He’s always had a habit of running off, chasing the next signal, and she has no reason to think it’ll stop now.

He loves her, she believes that. And he’ll want to stay: she believes that too. But she isn’t the mission, she isn’t the work. And the work always wins.


	10. nine // trust no 1

She writes him letters and wishes she was better at not sounding desperate. She writes them by hand on notebook paper and shreds them; she writes them on her window with dry-erase marker; she writes them in her head, the only place she believes is still inviolable. Eyes are everywhere, and nothing she makes real can ever be permanent.

On Christmas Eve after everyone else goes to bed, she stays up. Legs curled under her on the couch in her mother’s living room, the fire dying in the hearth. There’s a pad of paper on the side table next to the phone, and she writes.

_I miss you. I don’t think I have ever been so lonely._

She feeds the paper into the fire and watches it burn. Hours later her mother comes in and presses a cool hand to her forehead, thinking she’s asleep.

At Christmas dinner Bill says grace and Charlie, to his credit, refrains from rolling his eyes. Just as they’ve done for years now, each of them shares a memory of Melissa and a memory of their father. Dana recounts the time Missy got Charlie to start a food fight at a cousin’s wedding (it hadn’t been hard: at eight years old Charlie sought out opportunities to sow chaos, so when Missy rolled some mashed potato into a ball and flicked it onto Charlie’s lap, it was _on_ ).

“That is not what happened,” Charlie insists now. “She put that potato ball on my spoon and _dared_ me to catapult it.”

“She didn’t say a word to you, Charlie, we were all there.” Bill’s actually grinning.

“I swear. Come on, Dana, you know what happened.”

She holds up her hands in mock surrender. “Maybe I misremembered.”

“Oh, come on!” Charlie and Bill start talking over each other then, and Matthew is mashing up his peas like he’s about to start a food fight of his own, and William is making vague vowel sounds as his gaze darts around the table.

And for a minute, she can forget that anyone is missing. What’s left of her family can make enough noise to fill those absences, at least for a while.

After they’ve calmed down, it’s Maggie’s turn. She says, “I remember how hard the waiting was. Your father shipped out when Bill was three weeks old, and it felt impossible. I had to do everything by myself.” She is looking at Dana as she speaks. “But every time he left, I always knew he would come back. And he always did.”

That night she burns another letter, then sleeps to dream of ashes. In the dark she stands over William’s borrowed crib - the same one she’d dreamed in, a long time ago - and tries to imagine him a brighter future, a better life than hers.

The day after Christmas dawns blustery and gray, and Dana takes William to the beach. Her mother frets about the cold, piling scarves and hats on both of them, but Dana insists. She’d meant to take him over the summer, but five months ago he had been so small and she had been a whirlwind of worry and wanting. Now, something about it feels urgent.

In the sand she presses William’s chubby seven-month-old feet below the high-tide line, then towels off his toes and puts his boots back on. She writes his name beneath his footprints and whispers in his ear, “That’s you. Now the sea will always remember you.” Her father had done the same thing for her, a long time ago.

In the sand she writes, _come home, come home, come home_ , and together she and William watch the tide come in and wash her words away, then his tiny footprints, then his name. Nothing permanent. Nothing tangible can stay.

A long time ago, her father promised her that the sea remembers. She’d said, “I know,” and she does, she does.


	11. nine point five // i want to believe

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s another miracle, to be known so well.

When they bury Christian Fearon, she wears a black suit and a black trench and stands in a copse of trees just far enough away that she can’t hear or be heard, can’t see or be seen. She has been through this before. Fifty feet away, the priest explains that God’s plans required the death of this particular child.

 _Don’t give up_.

It is spring and the cherry blossoms are out. The season of rebirth. For a while, the treatment seemed like it was working. Christian sat up by himself. His words were less slurred, his seizures less frequent. He gave her a card that he signed himself, and then he died.

She’s received so many miracles that now she expects them all the time. But there was no computer chip to implant in Christian’s neck, no sudden cure, no deliverance offered at the last possible moment.

She remembers, in the end, that those miracles were never the work of her hands. Mulder made them all. Or maybe he just chased them down, relentless.

For a few weeks Scully sleepwalks through her days. She’ll have a pen to her prescription pad when her eyes lose focus, just for a moment. She doesn’t know why she thought this would be less painful than the X-files. The pain is just different. She still can’t save everyone.

One morning she wakes up to find that Mulder has left a pair of plane tickets on the kitchen counter, underneath her favorite coffee mug. She puts in her vacation request - her first in three years at the hospital - that day. It’s back on her desk an hour later with a note from Father Ybarra: “I think this is a good idea. You need some time away.”

On the airplane Mulder holds her hand, and it’s easy to remember why she stays.

The sunlit days are long and glorious, salt in her hair and on her tongue. They are different people in the light: she is freckled and golden, strands of her hair catching the light and keeping it. Mulder gets a haircut and shaves every day and tans deeply enough that their legs, tangled together in the sheets, look almost unfamiliar.

She could learn happiness here. At night he puts on his glasses and reads to her, and she settles against him so all she can hear is his voice, his heartbeat, the waves striving toward the shore. When she was a little girl her father warned her about riptides: it’s so easy to get carried away, and so hard to fight back. Mulder’s hand on her hip, pressing her toward him, his teeth at her collarbone; the tides, inevitable.

On the fifth day Scully rises early and pads outside, barefoot. Her toes curl in the sand. She walks to the edge of the water and settles herself on the ground, her legs out in front of her. A band of pink, low in the sky, hints at the dawn.

It’s quiet.

The sun has just crept over the horizon when Mulder approaches. It’s not like he doesn’t know how to be stealthy - he’s shuffling his feet through the sand to give her time, in case she needs to compose herself. She thinks about leaving him, sometimes, but it always seems impossible. It’s another miracle, she thinks, to be known so well.

“I didn’t know if you’d remember,” she says as he sits down beside her.

“Always.” He takes her hand. An ocean away, in some other time zone, in some other life, William is seven years old.

A little boy buried, and hers out there too, somewhere. There will be more miracles.

 


	12. // twelve // home again

They walk back to the car together, Mulder shooting her occasional anxious glances. He _should_ be nervous. She’s one wrong word away from collapsing or exploding, and she doesn’t know which, or what the collateral damage might be.

She lets the tears dry on her face. This is progress. At least today, at least this once, she’s not trying to hide the evidence.

The air is clear and cold. She’s grateful for it. There are still things to be grateful for.

She looks over at Mulder, and he looks quickly away.

When they get to the car he opens the passenger side door for her and she slides in, setting the urn on the floor between her feet. Because she needs another albatross. When the funeral home director handed it to her, she’d tried to imagine it in her sterile D.C. apartment, a place her mother had visited all of two times.

But of course Scully couldn’t picture it. Every time she imagines home, it looks like that house out in the country: the one with her name on the deed and his books on the shelves; her dishes stacked neatly in the cabinets and his sloppy carpentry on the porch.

Mulder gets in next to her. There is something immensely comforting about him beside her, driving. She’s spent almost half of her life sitting in the passenger seat with Mulder at the wheel. Sometimes it’s chafed at her, but at this moment, she doesn’t regret a single mile.

The heat blasts once he turns on the ignition. That’s all her: left to his own devices, Mulder would keep it freezing cold all the time. Their house has about two dozen throw blankets; in the winter she’d wrap herself in two or three of them and walk around the house that way. Years ago Mulder bought her a Slanket as a joke, with some snide comment about sexy pajamas, and she wore it all the time. The joke was on him.

He puts his hands on the wheel, lightly tapping his fingers on the rubber. Normally she’d recognize this as a sign of impatience, but today it’s just another manifestation of their shared anxiety, this sudden uncertainty about where they stand with one another. “So where to?” he asks.

There are so many ways to answer. The rational part of her reminds her that there are reasons why they don’t work together, can’t ever work. It tells her to go back to her apartment, alone.

They still haven’t finished the report on Philadelphia. God, she hates that city. Nothing good ever happens there. They could go back to the office and finish writing. She could bury herself in the work again, like she’s been doing for decades. There will always be more monsters to hunt.

But she’ll never find what she’s looking for in those files. It’s like she told him: most of her answers are unknowable.

Not all of them, though.

She thinks about the urn at her feet. She thinks about her father. She thinks about her mother’s last words and a teenaged boy, somewhere far away, with Mulder’s hair and Scully’s freckles and his own set of unanswerable questions. She thinks about surviving, and about a house in the country with both of their names on the mailbox.

Scully looks at him, his eyes shifting gray to green as he bites his lower lip. Yes, she thinks: there are some answers she has always known.

She says, “Take me home.”

//

 _when all around me_  
_is the sunlight_  
_is the shadows_  
_is the quiet_  
_is the work_  
_is the beating heart_  
_is you_


End file.
